German-born Walter Richard Sickert, who settled in London and became a famous artist in his later years, was the father of Joseph Sickert (see Chapter Twenty-Two) and another suspect to emerge more than a hundred years after the Whitechapel murders.
Walter Sickert would have been 28 at the time of the murders. He was closely examined as a suspect in 1993, when the US crime novelist Patricia Cornwell decided to examine him seriously for a book called Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed. She saw him a real suspect, though in my opinion this was a questionable conclusion, notwithstanding the integrity of her work.
Cornwell was prompted by the fact that Sickert had been said by his son, in a BBC television programme 20 years earlier, to have been associated with Prince Albert Victor and high-ranking government officials at the time of the murders.
According to Cornwell, in his early years in London Sickert frequented the slums of the East End, where, she stated, he had a number of secret rented studios. This has never been proved, but it is known that he rented studios in Camden Town, north London. Sickert’s models for his paintings were supposedly poor, unattractive female prostitutes. One such painting that fuelled Cornwell’s suspicions was The Camden Town Murder. There is some similarity between this work and the murder scene of Mary Kelly as photographed by the police. However, this painting and others Sickert painted in the same vein were not painted until many years after the murders and the photograph of the Kelly murder scene would have been readily available by then, as it still is today.
Cornwell’s main suspicions, however, arose from her study of the Ripper letters. In many of the letters sent to the police and the press, the sender stated that he hated prostitutes and was ridding the world of them. Cornwell suggested that Sickert also had good reason to hate prostitutes, as his grandmother had been a prostitute working in a dance hall, and her daughter, Sickert’s mother, was illegitimate. In Victorian times it was an accepted belief that, if a woman was immoral or a prostitute, she suffered from a genetic defect that could be passed down the bloodline.
Sickert, Cornwell stated, was born with a genetic defect of his penis that required surgery in his adolescence, her suggestion being that this would have prevented him having sexual intercourse and fathering children. She believed therefore that she had strong circumstantial evidence linking Sickert to the Whitechapel murders. In fact, she went so far as to say she suspected he was the Ripper himself. But she knew she would need direct evidence to prove this.
She thought that if she could obtain DNA from letters purporting to be from the Ripper, she could compare them with letters known to have been written by Sickert. It was at this stage, I suggest, that her theory was doomed to fail, for many experts have stated on record that all of the letters were hoaxes. I am sure she must have considered this fact, but, undeterred, she came to London with a team of forensic experts. Here she was given permission to examine the letters now contained in the Public Record Office. However, she discovered that the letters had been heat-sealed under plastic to preserve them, a process that degrades primary DNA. None of the letters had any trace of any DNA, primary or secondary. She then came into possession of a letter that, strangely enough, had not been handed over to the archives and had not been heat-sealed, so was suitable for DNA examination.
An initial test found that the letter had no trace of primary DNA. But it did have something no one had apparently seen before on a Ripper letter or, if they had, they had considered it unimportant. This was a watermark from Perry & Sons, an exclusive stationery manufacturer of the day. In the Sickert archives, Cornwell found that the artist had used the same stationery at the time of the Ripper crimes in 1888. An examination of other archive letters revealed four different watermarks on Ripper letters, which were also found on stationery used by Sickert and his wife during the time of the murders
In an attempt to acquire Sickert’s DNA, Cornwell acquired some of his paintings and tore them apart, examining the frames and canvas for fingerprints or traces of blood, but found nothing. It was the same story with his painting table.
After the first test failed to find DNA on the unsealed letter, Cornwell’s team decided to conduct a test for secondary, or mitochondrial, DNA. This test did find traces of secondary DNA on the letter. It also found secondary DNA on Sickert’s letters, but the DNA was a blend of DNA from many different people. There was a match between the secondary DNA on the Ripper letter and the secondary DNA on the Sickert letters. Cornwell’s hopes were somewhat dashed when her DNA expert pointed out that it was probably a mixture of different DNA, which matched a DNA sequence from the Ripper letter. At that time, Cornwell believed that the Sickert and the Ripper mitochondrial DNA did come from the same person. This view was not supported by her experts.
So is there any evidence to refute Cornwell’s theory that Sickert was the Ripper? Well, there are uncorroborated reports that Sickert was not even in the country at the time of some of the murders. He is said to have been painting in France between August and October 1888, although Cornwell argues that he was a man of mystery and not even his close friends knew where he was at any one time, but she has produced no positive proof of this. Her theory that Sickert was unable to have sexual intercourse and to father children is not correct, as he had a son, Joseph.
Despite what Cornwell believed, the DNA results she obtained do not conclude that Walter Sickert was the author of the Ripper letters. The findings are that the person whose mitochondrial DNA was found on Sickert’s correspondence could not be eliminated from the percentage of Britain’s population who could have provided an exact mitochondrial DNA match. Sickert’s DNA no longer exists as he was cremated after his death, so this cannot be compared with the DNA found on his correspondence.
I looked at the method and results of the mitochondrial DNA testing used in Cornwell’s investigation. Mitochondrial DNA test is widely used by many forensics laboratories for identification and, although it is a secondary test, it is considered as valid a method as primary, or nuclear, DNA testing. The important difference, however, is that it is much less specific and less accurate. Unlike primary DNA, secondary DNA is not unique. The discovery of a mitochondrial DNA match between two samples does not mean that one person left both, but that people from a certain percentage of the population could have left both.
To make it easier to understand, if you compare mitochondrial DNA testing to blood grouping, which police and scientists relied on before DNA came to the fore, if blood was found at the scene of a crime and identified as coming from a specific blood group, this evidence would be only circumstantial as it would be accepted that perhaps 20 per cent of the world’s population would have the same blood group. So, a mitochondrial DNA sequence found in Person A may also be found in Persons B and C, regardless of whether or not they are related by blood.
According to Cornwell, her experts calculated that only 1 per cent of the population of Britain at that time could have left the DNA found on the Ripper letter, and that the person whose DNA was found on Sickert’s letters was one of that 1 per cent. Other DNA experts disagree and state that the percentage could be anywhere between 0.1 and 10 per cent of the population. Following the census of 1901, it was estimated that there were nearly 40 million people in Britain. This means that, if the mitochondrial DNA on the letter is Sickert’s and her experts’ figure of 1 per cent is correct, Sickert was one of approximately 400,000 people whose mitochondrial DNA shared those same sequences. If the other experts are correct, he could have been one of four million.
Cornwell’s findings are not conclusive evidence and she has failed to produce any evidence that would stand up in a modern court. All she has done is show that Walter Sickert cannot be eliminated from suspicion of having written, or hoaxed, one or more Ripper letters, along with up to four million other residents of Britain at that time who also could have been responsible.
Looking at the watermarks found on both the Ripper and the Sickert letters – A. Pirie & Sons, Joynston Superfine and Monkton’s Superfine – Cornwell claimed she could match the watermark to Sickert and Sickert alone, because it matches the lot number that the paper was cut from. Basically, she believed that she had convincing evidence that Sickert wrote at least three or four Ripper letters, although she went as far as to say 90 per cent of the Ripper letters were written by him.
Cornwell also brought with her to England a forensic handwriting expert and, given that she has not produced any evidence from this expert’s examination of all the letters in the archives, we can only assume that her suspicions of the percentage of letters written by Sickert are now unfounded. Cornwell has answered this objection by suggesting that Sickert used to disguise his handwriting, but she has produced no evidence to corroborate this. In any event, if Sickert was the killer, and the writer of a number of Ripper letters, why would he disguise his handwriting by writing in different ways? In my experience, some killers do disguise their handwriting but, in order to make sure that the police are aware who the sender is, they stick to one style of disguised handwriting. In any event, if this had been the case here, a good forensic handwriting expert would have been able to match some characteristics from the letters he examined, but, as nothing was forthcoming, I can only assume no letters written in a disguised hand were found.
On the question of the watermarks, there were only around 90 paper mills operating in Britain in the late 1880s. Pirie was one of the largest. Furthermore, while the Joynston and Monkton brands may not have been as popular as Pirie, paper from these two manufacturers is likely to have been used during that era for documents and letters written by a large percentage of the population who could read and write.
So, what do I deduce from Cornwell’s research and findings? She set out to prove or disprove some interesting theories and was the first person to use modern forensic science in an attempt to solve the crimes, and for this I admire her.
Many researchers, including me, have wondered whether it was possible to extract useable DNA from any of the documents left behind in the archives. We now know that this is possible, although equally we know that in the absence of samples for comparison any results would be worthless, as turned out to be the case with Cornwell’s examinations.
Cornwell’s final conclusion was that Sickert could not be totally ruled out as being responsible for writing at least one of the Ripper letters. However, most Ripper experts believe that all of these were hoaxes, so in their view she fails to prove that Sickert was Jack the Ripper or was ever connected with others in committing the murders.
Nor can I find any evidence to convince me that Walter Sickert was involved in any of the murders.